Principal Engineer

About spotixx

spotixx is a Frankfurt-based FinTech company specializing in technology solutions for the regulated financial sector. Founded in 2019, our 60+ strong team has deep expertise in German and European banking, focusing on fraud investigation and financial crime prevention. Our core competence lies in Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and fraud detection, facilitating secure and compliant data sharing across financial institutions. Utilizing advanced AI and data science, we aim to advance collaborative intelligence for more effective crime prevention. As a self-funded organization, we emphasize sustained growth and meaningful impact while fostering a flexible hybrid working environment.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the design and ownership of platform systems, including architecture, data modeling, contracts, and integration boundaries, carefully evaluating trade-offs.
• Maintain a hands-on approach, particularly handling the most critical parts of development, delivering code that sets learning examples for the team.
• Establish and uphold design standards concerning architecture, security, and verification through reviews.
• Engineer scalable and secure systems capable of handling banking-grade loads and scrutiny.
• Enhance the technical capabilities of the engineering team via guidance, design reviews, and pair programming.
• Develop AI-driven workflows with necessary evaluations and safeguards for reliable deployment.
• Serve as a technical representative in interactions with clients, conducting workshops and due diligence with banking architects, CISOs, and risk departments in both German and English.
• Collaborate with senior management and supervisors to shape strategic goals and prioritize initiatives.

Required Qualifications

• Extensive hands-on experience, typically 8+ years, in building production-grade software with strong ownership over systems design and coding excellence.
• Fluency in both German and English to effectively engage with German banking clients.
• Proven track record working in large enterprise environments or vendors servicing such, knowledgeable of enterprise architecture reviews, security reviews, and change control processes.
• Advanced skills in systems design covering distributed systems, service architecture, contracts, data structures, and integration patterns.
• Experience utilizing AI-augmented development tools, coding agents, or AI-assisted software construction in professional or personal projects.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor and elevate peer engineers through influence, design feedback, and personal example.
• Maturity to convey technical risks clearly and meaningfully to business stakeholders.
• Ability to remain composed and credible during design scrutiny by bank architects and risk teams.
• Strong security mindset with secure-by-design principles, familiarity with OAuth/OIDC protocols, and data protection aligned with banking regulations.
• Commitment to high-quality software through verifiability and rigorous design reviews.
• Experience in regulated industries, preferably banking or FinTech sectors.
• Cloud platform expertise preferably Google Cloud Platform (GCP), AWS or Azure also acceptable, with knowledge of Infrastructure as Code (IaC), containerization, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Beneficial skills include Python with FastAPI, React with TypeScript, GCP stack familiarity, privacy-enhancing technologies or applied cryptographic methods (especially multiparty computation - MPC), multi-tenant SaaS architectures, and anti-financial-crime domain knowledge.

Benefits

• Competitive and attractive salary package.
• Flexible hybrid working arrangement (office in Frankfurt with option for home office within Germany).
• Opportunity for significant ownership and impact from the outset.
• Flat organizational structure promoting agility and fast decision-making.
• Collaborative and international team culture.
• Engagement in mission-driven products combating financial crime.
• Responsibility for the design and hands-on development of core data-sharing platform architecture.
• Equal opportunity employer valuing diversity across gender, age, origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, and more; preference given to applicants with disabilities if equally qualified.